Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie did not disclose his associations with Confederate groups on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee prior to his confirmation hearing last year, according to a copy of the form obtained by CNN's KFile. CNN's KFile reported in December that Wilkie, who was confirmed by the Senate as VA secretary in July 2018, gave a speech to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2009 and, in 1995, praised Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a speech at the US Capitol. Wilkie was also at one point a member of the Sons...

While Hollywood women have made incremental gains in below-the-line jobs like producing and editing, they backslid as feature film directors and continue on a path of “radical underrepresentation” in the industry, a new study says. Martha Lauzen’s “Celluloid Ceiling,” a comprehensive report of women’s behind-the-scenes employment in film run out of San Diego State University, hit on Thursday — and its analysis comes with a blazing criticism that Hollywood’s value shift is only lip service until the industry commits to transparency. “The study provides no evidence that the mainstream film industry has experienced the profound positive shift predicted by so...

Democrats are worried that they have a problem: The three people leading polls in the very early stages of their presidential race are all white men. The party traditionally battles over identity politics and wants to be seen as promoting diversity. Its last three nominees have been Barack Obama, who became the nation’s first African-American president, and Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win the popular vote. Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) are this year’s top-tier candidates, according to a recent and very early Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll. It showed that 32...

Markers are already being laid down along racial and gender lines that could restrict Dem options for assembling a 2020 ticket. On Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning, guest Jason Johnson warned: JASON JOHNSON: What's the most important constituency for Democrats in 2020? Black women. And I've heard plenty of black women say, if there's not a black woman on this ticket, I'm not voting, I'm not excited, I'm not enthusiastic."If the Democratic party wants to run seriously in 2020, they can't relegate black women to second class. They can't relegate black women a consolation prize. Not-so-joyous Reid then established...

Heather Mac Donald has written and spoken extensively about how identity politics is hampering America’s ability to maintain its dominance in STEM fields. Our main competitors, most notably China, are focused on making sure the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are doing the work. They care nothing about gender. And they spend virtually every dollar related to STEM on hard research and analysis. The U.S., by contrast, is preoccupied with the gender and (to a lesser extent) the race and ethnicity of who is in the lab. And we pour money into promoting identity politics in STEM. Indeed, Elizabeth Harrington...

Fox News co-hosts Jesse Watters and Juan Williams fell into an on-air disagreement on Monday over whether the Democratic Party is "anti-white." Watters made the accusation while discussing what Democrats would need to do to see a major win in Tuesday's midterm elections, with the Fox News host questioning whether the Democratic Party can "be for diversity" but also be "so anti-white," as first reported by Media Matters. "Can the Democratic Party be for diversity, but also be against open borders, and not be so anti-white?" Watters said. "So far, they haven't been able to strike that balance. Right now,...

Liberals are preparing for Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris’s possible expulsion from the Senate Judiciary Committee by highlighting she is a black woman. In the event that Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith wins the Mississippi runoff election on Nov. 27, the makeup of the Senate Judiciary Committee will shift in favor of the GOP, with a seat currently held by a Democrat flipping red. Consequently, Harris, the most junior Democratic member of the committee, will likely be squeezed out. “Not only would it be unconscionable to remove the only African American woman from the committee, but Senator Harris also is the most...

Since it’s clear that Daniel Craig (the sixth actor to officially play Bond since 1962) has one foot out the door of the Aston-Martin, the conversation about diversifying 007 has been happening in earnest. Is one of Hollywood’s oldest properties ready for a reboot? A new survey, conducted by Morning Consult and the Hollywood Reporter, asked 2,201 U.S. adults how they would feel about the fictional spy shifting demographics: from British to American, from male to female, from straight to gay, or from Caucasian to another ethnicity. The results show that a narrow majority support a black James Bond and...

“What you see Trump and Rick Scott and other Republicans doing here is counting on the power of racism to serve as fact," said an Emory University professor. Most weeks the Broward County Elections Office, nestled in the Lauderhill Mall just off US 441 in Lauderhill, Florida, isn’t the kind of place that draws a crowd. But on Election Day earlier this month, as Bob Henry Sr. stood in the parking lot closest to the county office, what he saw looked like something just short of a mob. The parking lot had become a locus for the frustrated, the distrustful,...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly-elected Congresswoman from New York and faux socialist in the $3,505 designer pantsuit, is backing the Justice Democrats — a socialist insurgent group within the Demonrat Party which opposes “Democratic incumbents who are demographically and ideologically out-of-touch with their districts.” Note: Just as the Left have corrupted the rainbow by appropriating it as an LGBT symbol, they’ve also corrupted the word “justice” by equating it with Marxist socialism, as in “social justice” and “Justice Democrats”.

According to a recent report in The New York Times, Health and Human Services Department officials have been circulating a proposal to define sex. Their memo says, "Sex means a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth." They add, "The sex listed on a person's birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person's sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence." I think the latter statement lacks complete rigor. It's chromosomes, not what's on a birth certificate, that determine one's sex. Therefore, if a fetus has XX chromosomes,...

Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin’s direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so...

Tomahawk Liz is not a Cherokee. Itâ€™s only something that everyoneÂ who wasnâ€™t a blind and stupid liberal had known for years. Sheâ€™s just a white woman appropriating Native American culture for personal gain. She took a DNA test, which showed that sheâ€™s a whopping 1/1024thÂ Native American. In other words, sheâ€™s not an American Indian, despite her shoddy family story about high cheekbones. Sheâ€™s a fake who peddled a racial hoax, something thatâ€™s been hanging around her neck since 2012.Â Fordham pushed that Warren was the institutionâ€™s first woman of color. Â Harvard also said Warren was a Native American. This is...

Michael Orbino, 42, was found not guilty of all felony hate crime and harassment charges by an Ontario County jury after a four-day trial. According to court testimony, Orbino was at Baker Park in the City of Canandaigua screaming racist slurs at two African-American high school girls.

ORLEANS — Progressive activists at Netroots Nation in New Orleans this past weekend had a message for the establishment of the Democratic Party: start talking about race or step aside. The marquee annual conference for the left — a key stop for possible presidential candidates since its first meeting in 2006 — made it clear in their program at the outset, that “Democrats must abandon the myth of the white swing voter and invest in the multi-racial, multicultural coalition of voters that make up the majority of our electorate.” But some Democrats are better prepared for this than others. In...

Obama in a dress is really off to a great start, spending a lot of money on planning her presidential campaign, while strongly hinting that anyone who isn't on board is a racist. Sen. Kamala Harris accused critics of “identity politics” of weaponizing the term to diminish issues of race, gender and sexual orientation, pressing Democrats on Friday to address those issues head on. “I have a problem, guys, with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” Harris told the progressive gathering Netroots Nation, wading into a messaging debate roiling Democrats ahead of the midterm elections. “Because let’s be clear, when people say...

The human animal seems hard-wired for tribalism, and the ties that bind are shaped by our compelling need to group together, obeying calls for loyalties and exclusions. Some groupings not only contribute to the gratifications of bonding, whether in family, clubs, choirs or loyalty to sports teams, but also provide the glue that holds a community together. But tribes become the "factions" that former President George Washington warned against in his Farewell Address, heightening differences and rivalries that the Founding Fathers hoped to dilute through checks and balances in the three branches of government. In the age of the internet,...

Today Ben Weingarten launched a new podcast, Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten, of likely interest. Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten features compelling long-form conversations with exceptional thinkers and doers -- primarily though not exclusively of a conservative/libertarian bent -- on the most critical ideas and issues of our time, and all time. The podcast aims to inject a counter-narrative to the prevailing progressive orthodoxy, and elicit deep insights on fundamental questions ranging from national security to economics, and philosophy to culture – fostering timeless discussions on what really matters, rather than chasing the news cycle. Here are the inaugural episodes:...

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters back legalizing marijuana, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. Support for legalization hit 63 percent in the survey — the highest level of support recorded by a Quinnipiac poll. A third of American voters still oppose legalization, the poll found. Support for medical marijuana is even higher, at 93 percent. Only about 5 percent of respondents opposed it. The poll also found little support for Attorney General Jeff Sessions's decision earlier this year to rescind an Obama-era policy that paved the way for individual states to legalize marijuana without federal interference. Seventy percent...